Niels Bohr is coming to Los Alamos! The A-list physicist, who unlocked the quantum structure of the atom, has escaped Nazi-occupied Denmark and reached New Mexico. It's a development that excites the entire town and drives the story of episode 4.

Akley vs. Winter

The episode opens on a battlefield, not in this Second World War but the first. Huddling in their trench, a pack of American soldiers watch as "Fathead," a young doughboy, is given an intelligence mission to sneak out at night and collect documents off dead German soldiers. We don't get Fathead's real name right away, although it's a pretty good guess that it's Frank Winter.

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Returning to the present (1943), Winter is in a doctor's office discussing his service record. He wants more sleeping pills, but the doctor doesn't want to give them to him. The doctor starts asking him questions: does he feel distant? Is he concerned about the future? "Certain parties" are concerned with Winter's dependence on the pills and don't want him taking any more without a psychiatric evaluation.

One of those parties, unsurprisingly, is Reed Akley, leader of the group working on the Thin Man bomb design, the leading plan at the moment. Paul Crosley, the Oxford man on Winter's team, is in Akley's office discussing his desire to transfer to Thin Man. Akley encourages that notion, saying there are questions about Winter's ability to lead a group.

Winter' group, working on an implosion bomb design, have just received a solitary set of explosive primers that they can use to test their design. If they can refine their method, they might even get some priceless plutonium to work with. The future of the group rests with how well they execute this test.

Bohr and Blowing Things Up

Charlie Isaacs has been granted an audience with Manhattan Project leader Robert Oppenheimer at breakfast. He's being pulled from Thin Man, at Reed Akley's request, to squire for Niels Bohr wherever the Nobel Prize winner goes, Charlie goes. Oppenheimer hands him an important-looking envelope with important details inside. They are to be carried out to the letter.

Manhattan presents Bohr, like Oppenheimer, as an eccentric. When his car arrives, it is empty—the driver says Bohr insisted on walking. When he finally arrives, he regales people with a truncated version of how he escaped Europe: passed out in a cargo hold over Norway and woken up in Britain.

This is largely true to the real life story. Bohr, who was facing arrest in Nazi-occupied Denmark, first escaped to Sweden and then was extracted by the British in a daring night evacuation. Bohr was placed in the cargo bay of a plane with a helmet, parachute, and an oxygen mask; however, the helmet was too small for his fat head and so he didn't get the pilots intercom message to don his oxygen mask. He really did pass out over the North Sea. Thankfully, the trip was short and he awoke when they landed.

As Charlie tries to impress him with his knowledge of his work, Bohr seems more interested in kestrels flying overhead. He's also very interested in Frank Winter, who he appears to know. They chat briefly and Bohr says he's recently cited one of Winter's papers.

Out in the desert, Winter is setting up the test rig with Crosley. "Bolt it down," Winter says, as he loads the rig with the explosive primers. Crosley's eyes widen with the realization that Winter plans to do the test right here, right now. This is very much a violation of Army protocol, their MP chaperone reminds them. Winter plows ahead, Army ordinance expert be damned.

He and Crosley finish setting up the rig and detonate the explosives. Nothing happens. Winter gets up to go check it out, even though he's supposed to wait 30 minutes. These are 30 minutes he doesn't have. As he approaches the bomb it finally goes off, blowing him back 10 feet. Winter's only question: "Is the camera okay?"

Back at base camp, everybody is still buzzing with the news of Bohr's arrival, and Charlie is showing the great Dane around the Akley group's lab. They have a presentation prepared for him, but he'd rather have Charlie explain it to him one-on-one. "It's a cannon," Bohr observes. He makes a skeptical comment about pre-detonating the fuel with spontaneously generated neutrons. Charlie, has worked that out, though, and found the right conditions at which that won't happen. But he's suddenly paged to the switchboard room for an emergency call.

The emergency is that his wife, Abby, is horny and wants a quickie while the other switchboard girls are out to lunch. They have five minutes, which is plenty of time when you're whispering dirty things like "Planck's constant," or "electron motion" in your partner's ear. Fact check: This does not work nearly as well in real life.

Out in the desert, Winter and Crosley's jeep has broken down. To prevent the camera from overheating and ruining the film of their precious implosion test, they need to start moving back to base camp by dawn. Suddenly, Crosley drops the news he's leaving for Akley's group. Angered, Winter grabs the camera and starts walking. The MP draws his gun and unconvincingly shouts, "I'm in charge here!" Winter easily disarms him and trudges off.

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Bored by the Thin Man, Bohr decides he wants to see what the Winter group is up to. Despite Charlie's objections, he heads off towards their lab. The group (which are without Winter and Cosley) sees him coming and scrambles to find what to say. After a few awkward interactions, Bohr smiles, and says something about infinite universes, then moves on. What he really wants is Charlie to explain the implosion design to him.

Charlie, meanwhile, is looking at the full design for the first time (because of compartmentalization), wonders aloud over the geometry. Bohr asks, "Is it big enough?" Right then, Oppenheimer himself comes into the lab, unhappy that Bohr found his way into the Winter group's research. "Did you not understand your instructions?" he asks Charlie. After barely a day on the job, Charlie is fired. He won't be shadowing Niels Bohr any longer.

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As Winter is walking through the desert, Crosley and the MP are behind him, fighting over who is more important to a war effort: soldiers or scientists. "If it weren't for guys like me, guys like you would still be poking each other to death with sharpened sticks," Crosley says. He asks the MP for a drink of water and for him to hold the camera. The MP, sensing he's going to be tricked into lugging the camera, says no. Unable to hold both the canteen and the camera, Crosley drops the latter. It hits the ground and the housing splits open, exposing the film to all the light in the day. Winter abandons them and heads for home.

Walking alone in the dark, Winter is suddenly transported back to WWI. Amidst shells exploding, he finds a German soldier face down in a mud puddle. As he searches him for intel, a picture of a woman falls out of the Germans' notebook. He leaves but turns back to tuck the photo back in the fallen soldier's breast pocket. Winter, apparently, does have a soft side. Or at least he did.

Charlie comes home to Abby getting ready for the big party. He doesn't want to go, now that he's screwed up his special assignment. But Abby encourages him. Together, they'll go there and fix everything with Bohr, the man she thinks will soon be running the project.

To escape a boring dinner with the senior scientists, Winter's wife Liza and Bohr head off to the bar. Bohr relays some touching sentiments of Frank's—thoughts he apparently hasn't shared with his wife. After Bohr won his Nobel, Frank told him him that the only way he'd see a Nobel ceremony was as his wife's dinner companion. Flowers bloom everywhere, even in the desert, Bohr says, as if that thought hadn't occurred to Liza before.

A strange relationship between Callie Winter and PFC Dunlavy is one flower that's blooming in the desert. She catches him outside her window, staring at her house. No sense calling the MPs about a peeping tom, because he pretty much is the MPs, so she flashes him instead.

Out in the desert again, Crosley and the MP start moving and come upon Winter, whose foot is bleeding profusely after stepping on some shrapnel. As the MP tends to the foot, Winter gets, well, frank with Crosley. "Why are you here?" he asks. Unsatisfied with Crosley's response that it's to be a part of the great concentration of talents there, Winter ventures that it's because Crosley wants his own talents to be put to actual use. That won't happen with Akley, because Akley's the crazy one, "punching clocks during wartime." He then pulls a gun on Crosley. "No one is coming to save us," he says. Not out in the desert, and not in their quest to build the bomb.

Finally, we learn that Bohr is not here to save the Manhattan project. In his toast to the Nobel-winner, Oppenheimer reveals this to be just a brief visit. Bohr exits the banquet hall and Charlie comes running after to ask why he's not joining. Bohr says that he has no appetite in designing weapons like that. He mentions Fritz Haber (though not by name), the German chemist who went from designing fertilizer to chemical weapons. Those deadly gases, he says, were thought so horrendous they would discourage future wars. Not so much.

Fact vs. Fiction

It might be useful to pause and reconcile the facts about Bohr's involvement with the Manhattan Project with what's presented here. Yes, Bohr did visit the Manhattan Project. And he was more involved with it than this episode suggests. He made several extended trips to Los Alamos during the war, serving as a consultant under the code name Nicholas Baker. Bohr did anticipate the outsized impact that nuclear weapons would have on the post-war world, and was outwardly concerned about setting up an international system for monitoring and controlling atomic energy.

We'll have to see if Manhattan brings Bohr back, as the show trots out the big names like Oppenheimer and Bohr more as plot points than as real characters.

The episode wraps up neatly: Bohr leaves, Charlie is back in Akley's group, and Liza is looking at flowers. Apparently she did need Bohr's encouragement.

Winter and Crosley have made it back to the lab finally. Crosley has had a sudden change of heart—he suggests they take his car out to the test site again. Winter looks confused for a second, as they've blown their only set of primers, but Crosley has taken a page from Winter's playbook and pilfered a set from Akley's lab. All they have to do is make sure the camera's running.